Cite as: 517 U. S. 44 (1996)
Souter, J., dissenting
affirmative justification (as Bivens does). See Bivens, supra; FDIC v. Meyer, 510 U. S. 471, 484-486 (1994).
The Bivens issue in Chilicky (and in Meyer) is different from the Young issue here in every significant respect. Young is not an example of a novel rule that a proponent has a burden to justify affirmatively on policy grounds in every context in which it might arguably be recognized; it is a general principle of federal equity jurisdiction that has been recognized throughout our history and for centuries before our own history began. Young does not provide retrospective monetary relief but allows prospective enforcement of federal law that is entitled to prevail under the Supremacy Clause. It requires not money payments from a government employee's personal pocket, but lawful conduct by a public employee acting in his official capacity. Young would not function here to provide a merely supplementary regime of compensation to deter illegal action, but the sole jurisdictional basis for an Article III court's enforcement of a clear federal statutory obligation, without which a congressional act would be rendered a nullity in a federal court. One cannot intelligibly generalize from Chilicky's standards for imposing the burden to justify a supplementary scheme of tort law to the displacement of Young's traditional and indispensable jurisdictional basis for ensuring official compliance with federal law when a State itself is immune from suit.
2
Next, the Court suggests that it may be justified in displacing Young because Young would allow litigants to ignore the "intricate procedures" of IGRA in favor of a menu of streamlined equity rules from which any litigant could order as he saw fit. But there is no basis in law for this suggestion, and the strongest authority to reject it. Young did not establish a new cause of action and it does not impose any particular procedural regime in the suits it permits. It stands, instead, for a jurisdictional rule by which paramount
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